Conservatives & Republicans

Quite a few right-wingers call themselves constitutional conservatives, but self-described constitutional liberals are pretty rare. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman essentially positioned himself as one in a Friday post, arguing that there’s no need for modern Americans to interpret the Constitution the way the Founders did, but contending that the Founders would be OK with that…

It seems that Democratic National Committee chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz has herself programmed to automatically criticize any Republican governor in the U.S. for refusing to implement a state Obamacare exchange. Wasserman Schultz made that contention on Tuesday about Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval. She did so on Nevada's "Ralston Reports," a TV program hosted by Jon Ralston, whose…

Liberals like to opine that righty Republicans of the fairly recent past, such as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., or even Ronald Reagan, were nowhere near as wild-eyed as the Tea Party crowd. In a Tuesday Daily Kos post by the mononymous Hunter, it was Bob Dole (granted, no one’s idea of a movement conservative) who represented the party’s rational “old guard” against the “clearly…

What do Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Vladimir Lenin have in common? If you answered that they’re all Republican strategists, you’re sort of right, suggested Seth D. Michaels in a Thursday article at Talking Points Memo. Michaels claimed that GOPers are using a Leninist approach to subvert an increased government role in the health-care system. (Oh, the irony.) Specifically, they’ve taken “…

According to MSNBC, Republicans are always making things worse. On the July 25 edition of Ronan Farrow Daily, the cable host began a segment entitled “Kinder, Gentler GOP?” after playing a clip of Rand Paul at the National Urban League annual conference speaking of the “poverty problem.” Farrow asked his guests a stream of leading questions insinuating that Republicans are “catering to a…

In his never-ending obsession with Ted Cruz, Hardball’s Chris Matthews devoted the start and close of his program to rants against the supposed "McCarthyism" of the Texas Senator. Matthews objected to Cruz’s belief that the FAA’s short lived ban on air travel to Israel was political in nature. On the July 24 edition of Matthews’ program, the host wondered if Cruz was “trying to mimic the…

Ed Schultz spent a portion of his opening monologue on his MSNBC show Thursday attacking Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his latest policy proposal to reform government welfare programs, declaring that Ryan is “more radical than ever” and he’s “out there selling turd in the punch bowl.” After trumpeting the long-standing liberal policy of increasing the minimum wage (which never works…

Wednesday's NBC Nightly News was the sole Big Three evening newscast to notice the criticism of the Obama administration banning U.S. airliners from traveling to Israel. Prominent politicians from both sides of the political spectrum, including Senator Ted Cruz and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have denounced this move by the FAA. Senator Cruz accused the administration of using…

When a U.S. president is using the IRS to terrify his political enemies, destroying American health care and opening our southern border to millions of future welfare-collecting, Democratic voters from the Third World, why is a dime's worth of money being wasted on trying to replace the Republican senator from Mississippi with a slightly different Republican? Honestly, I think these deck…

It has been eight days since Marine Corps Commandant and Joint Chiefs of Staff member General James Amos spoke out against the current lack-of-leadership climate in Washington. Specifically, in a question-and-answer session at the Brookings Institution on July 15 (PDF transcript here), Amos noted how badly the situation in Iraq has deteriorated since U.S. troops' departure in 2010, and…

Politico reporters are badly burning themselves on Twitter these days. Last night (as yours truly noted this afternoon), the web site's Roger Simon, apparently upset that Rick Perry is doing his job, tweeted that the Texas governor is "sending 1,000 National Guard troops to border to shoot small children." Yet 12 hours later, Glenn Thrush, another longtime Politico veteran, tweeted a plea for…

Liberals typically accuse conservatives of being fuddy-duddies, squares, and so on, but Daily Kos writer Hunter has a somewhat different take: he thinks most righties are “Reagan hipsters.” The caveat is that he doesn’t mean it as praise. Apropos of the Republican National Committee selling throwback "Reagan Bush ’84" T-shirts on its website, Hunter asserted Monday that for today’s right-…

Roger Simon "joined Politico as its first chief political columnist" in 2006. A couple of items on his resume include being "the only person to win twice the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for commentary," and a 2013 National Press Club humor-related award. Judges for that award said that "Simon's writing is witty, specific and based on sharp observations of…

It never fails. When the regime of center-right political leader with executive authority begins to implode, the focus is on how and why that person is failing — as it should be. When it becomes clear that a leftist mayor, governor, or president is entering the failure zone, it's because the job is impossible, or the city, state, or nation has become "ungovernable." We're entering the excuses…